LONGMONT -- Data storage company Seagate has announced it is making a major push into the solid-state drive business, including marketing them directly to consumers for the first time, and its Colorado Design Center in Longmont is playing a major role in the initiative.

The company on Thursday is hosting a job fair in Longmont with the intent of hiring up to about 150 people, mostly engineers, by year's end.

The new push into building "client" SSDs is a big part of the reason for those hires, according to Gary Gentry, a Seagate senior vice president and the general manager of the company's SSD business.

Seagate Job Fair

"My client team will be headquartered here in Longmont," said Gentry. "We already have a substantial group and we're expanding the technology, the product and the business development here in Longmont."

The new Seagate 600 SSD will be marketed to consumers but also to original equipment manufacturers and distributors who want to, for example, upgrade a laptop. The company says that in the case of laptops, the 600 SSD will give users boot-up speeds four times faster and load applications more than twice as fast as with a standard magnetic hard drive.

The 600 SSD will offer up to 480 gigabytes of capacity and will be as fast and easy to install as a hard disk drive upgrade, the company said.

Seagate also is introducing the new line of enterprise SSDs for businesses. These, like the company's previous enterprise SSDs, will primarily be produced out of Seagate's U.S. design center in Minnesota.

The Colorado Design Center is the company's largest of four globally and is home to the largest number of private-sector employees in the Longmont area, with about 1,250 workers.

Longmont also played a key role in the development of the company's hybrid flash/magnetic drive, according to Jeff Mason, a Seagate vice president and the site management lead for the Colorado Design Center.

Longmont also continues to be a major source of innovation for the company's more traditional hard disk drives, he said.

"We're developing devices that are specially designed to suit the needs of large-scale cloud storage systems," Mason said.

Mason called Thursday's job fair the biggest recruitment effort the Cupertino, Calif.-based company has put on in about a decade.

"We are looking for a variety of engineering positions, mostly entry level, that span a variety of engineering disciplines," said Mason. "The hiring will occur pretty much equally throughout the year."

While expanding its offerings in the SSD market is a big deal for Seagate, because of the increased use worldwide of mobile consumer devices, hard drive production will continue to be an important function for the company for years to come, Mason said.

"There's not enough SSD production in the world to replace the amount of storage that magnetic storage devices provide," he said. "Mobile devices are not a displacer (because of the cloud) -- they're really a stimulant for more magnetic storage."

Technician Jeff Hogue runs tests after loading firmware on to hard drives at Seagate in Longmont recently. The company will hold a job fair Thursday and has said it hopes to hire up to 150 people by the end of this year, mostly engineers. (Greg Lindstrom/Times-Call)
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Greg Lindstrom
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